Dedications
For Jennifer Toone Taylor, who invited me to try.
And for Ju, who showed me I already knew how.
Also by T. Van Santana
AN AXE +2 GRIND
THE DARK SIDE OF THE LIGHT
THE DREAM REGISTER OF TVS
FLASHES
GAUCHO
INCORPOREAL
MONTEREY
THE WEIGHT OF WORDS
The Secret of Secrets:
EVERYTHING FAILS: A SCIENCE FICTIONAL MEMOIR
THESE ARE THE THINGS I KNOW
THE GRAND STORY OF NOT
THE THIEVES OF ALL THAT YOU ARE
WE CAN NEVER GO BACK
LOVE IS WHAT YOU HAVE
BE A DARK HORSE!
THE STARS CALL US HOME
T VAN SANTANA & THE BLACK BOOK OF FEAR
UNTITLED
A GALAXY OF SUBMISSION
T VAN SANTANA & THE CODEX OF COHERENCE
SOMA
SOMA-2
As editor
TALES FROM AZZA-JONO (also contributing author)
TVS NANOFICTION ANNUAL 1
1 | Does This Sound Familiar?
So I’m me. That’s when you say, "Hi me! Nice to meet you!" Or something like that.
Sometimes it’s awesome to be me, sometimes it sucks hard. I work my ass off and believe in what I do. Spent the better part of life trying to accomplish what I think’s important, living with a sundry of split notions. Masculine and feminine. Mind and body. Inside and outside. I’m seeing more and more how these distinctions are unreal by looking closer at what is real. And I’m moving on.
With the weather being like it is, I dunno how I get a fuckin’ thing done. These storms keep rolling in, destroying my head. I hurt pretty much all the time. You’d think by now this wouldn’t happen. But it does.
I work in the secrets trade. The word for people who do what I do is secretist. Try it on. Get comfy. I provide a discreet service, at a cost. It happens in a time and place of elegant appointment. That’s all I’ll say for now. Don’t wanna spoil your dinner. These days, I’m happy with work. I don’t know if I’m getting better at what I do or caring less. I suppose I care about what I do, but less about everything else. I’m relaxing into it. Loosening up.
Was thinking today about how Bubble controls your fucking life. If you die—and there seem to be an awful lot of folks dying out there—Bubble maintains your presence, even if your family wants it gone. That’s so fucked up.
Speaking of family, my sister just Bubbled that some asshole harassed her on the tube yesterday. She laid him out. Good for her. I keep meaning to blow her a Bubble, but I’m forever outta time. Gone from sittin’ around every waking minute wondering how I’ll ever do anything with my life to wondering when in fuck I’ll have time to do nothing again. Sucks.
I was born to run, but I’ve become a creature of routine, drawn into ephemera. Some of the mystery of life is lost—not just in the mystical sense, though that, too, but in the unknowns of everyday. Lost to a greater acceptance of a diversity of outcomes. Lost to habits. Habits, which while beneficial, are predictable and consistent.
When I was young, I was in a band. Somehow that’s still a part of me, even though it doesn’t show like it did. Nothing makes people swoon like being in a band. I guess I’m trying to make you swoon a little.
I spent my adolescence depressed to the point of suicide. Spent the better part of my twenties having panic attacks. Found my calling while falling. Spent the better part of my life searching for perfect love, finding very imperfect love many times over, and trying to keep it. A few times I did, you know, for a time, hold onto it. Even after I found lasting love, I spent the next few years trying to disentangle myself from my imperfections. That’s a long fucking while dancing with nostalgic ghosts, dreaming acetylcholine angels on beautiful dopaminergic wings flying to the gates of heaven, only to cross the celestial threshold back to the hollow feelings of waking life.
I like clothes. I never have the money to get the designers I like, but I have a good eye and find decent pieces for what I can afford. I catch people looking. I’m never quite as polished as I want, nor as authentic as I want to be in my look.
Authenticity was my mission, though it’s become one of those words that muddies each time I say it. So now it’s more a guiding light than a standard, a line I follow when I’m snow-blind and stinging in the nose.
I paint. I write. I’m very sexual and often don’t know what to do with that.
I dunno what else to tell you. That’s me.
2 | Three Worlds, Technically Four
I’ve lived on three worlds. Well, technically four.
There’s the Homeworld, full of rich variety and seasons, long summers and nostalgic winters. It’s the land of my ancestors, living and dead. It’s where I learned to walk and talk, read, be a child and a sibling, be a neighbor. Where I learned about dogs and cats and life and death. My grandmother—that’s my mother’s mother—she was my favorite person in the galaxy. As a child, I saw her every day and could think of nothing more to want. All my family was there, all my friends. Everything.
Then a terrible storm came, destroyed my father’s business. Shortly after, he went to work for the CoDex Corporation, whose factory was the sole sustenance of Blackwater, our town. Wasn’t long before he drew notice from upper management and was sent out on long-stretch expeditions, taking him away from us—away from me. To make matters worse, his home office was relocated to another planet, a distant and cold place deeper into unknown space.
I found that planet—The Golden Planet, so-called because of its rolling gold plains and gray skies—hospitable, even if migrating there had torn me from the arms of my grandmother and enervated my connection to the land of my ancestors. On arrival, I was teased for being an alien but did not particularly feel alien. Indeed, in a short time, my grandmother grew concerned. I was becoming too like the Golden inhabitants, she said. I was losing touch with the Homeworld, she said. But I was very young still and unconcerned with such things.
I’ve heard my speech sounds most the Gold, but often it’s confounded folks, making them unable to place precisely where I’m from. That’s cool by me. Helps with secrecy.
It was on the Gold where I met formal education and found a broader world of friendship. Also dating. Well, we called it going together, even though there was typically nowhere to go and little to do. I was popular with the so-called opposite sex and that’s how it was on the Gold.
As I moved up in education, I found the pressure increased, as did social complexities. I began to feel lost in the crowd. Shuffled around. My first run-ins with authority were appeals to those in charge for help and protection, appeals which went awry. I placed trust where I was told it should be placed, where it ought to be, and then got turned away by assholes disinterested in human suffering. It’s the first set of many such occasions. Later on, newer neural networks let me see how my younger appraisals were overblown. But that’s how I saw it back then, on the Gold.
The third world is the Jungle Planet, full of savagery and green. It’s there that I made my proper life, and where we lay our scene. It was there, at an age too young, I found my way into wide open danger. I found my pen and my brush, my pistol and blade. Found the deep forest